I swear to god these have got to be two of the most straw-(wo)manned figures ever, and they clearly get a lot of people’s backs up which in turn gets my back up. Argh. I’d like to read some sober balanced assessments.
May 29, 2009
… is the big deal about Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon?
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Hey Nate,
For my 18th birthday, my older brother gave me a copy of “Refusing to be a Man” by John Stoltenberg. This was my introduction to MacKinnon and Dworkin, and I was profoundly impressed by his interpretation of their analysis for a year or two, until I started reading Susie Bright. I highly recommend Bright’s many critical pieces on M&D, partly because they are entertaining reading by a gifted writer, but mostly because no one can accuse Bright of any sort of anti-feminist politics. When discussing Dworkin in particular, nothing is more clear than Bright’s deep love and admiration for her antagonist. A couple brief pieces available on the web:
http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6146278/Susie-Bright-The-Baffling-Case-of-Andrea-Dworkin
http://susiebright.blogs.com/Old_Static_Site_Files/Prime_Of_Kitty_MacKinnon.pdf
None of these are particularly deep in their analysis, but the general points are ones I support. At this point, I haven’t spent time thinking about M&D in many many years, so I won’t comment further on their politics. I hope this is helpful to you.
Solidarity,
Mike
Comment by Mike S. — June 1, 2009 @ 11:37 am
I haven’t read too much of ‘em, mostly critiques in my sex-positively taught intro to feminism class at Mac.
I did read an article by Dworkin called Men Can Stop Rape or something like that, which I found had a pretty poor analysis of things, particularly in the consistent setting up of gender and feminism with all these weird military metaphors. It read like Dworkin thought “men” and “women” were two different armies and that men just keep winning. Coming from the more open-minded kind of bell hooks perspective, which is how I came into feminism, this stuff really rubbed me the wrong way.
Comment by Brendan — June 1, 2009 @ 12:51 pm
hi Mike, Brendan,
Mike, thanks for that, I’ll check it out.
Brendan, I think Dworkin get’s strawmanned a lot, that’s what sets me off and made me toss up this one liner post. In my reading she’s not anti-sex at all, she’s against what she sees as the eroticization of violence. I find “sex positive feminism” not a helpful term generally, as it implies that other feminists are anti-sex. There’s some good critical work on sexual liberation as an ideology that facilitated men’s instrumentalizing of women within the New Left, there’s stuff on this by the people who were part of Cell 16, it’s in either The Feminist Memoir Project or Dear Sisters, I can’t remember which. Maybe both. That’s not to say sexual liberation is a bad idea or is impossible, but that in some contexts the idea has an ideological function that we should be critical of. Dworkin comes out of that milieu, having been part of a sexual liberation scene when she was younger. To be totally honest, I think there’s a fair comparison to be made between Dworkin and syndicalism vs people who want immediate sexual revolution and lifestylists and mutualists. Clearly there’s merit on all sides and clearly we don’t have to draw that stark an opposition and pick sides, but if we *did* have to pick sides I’m for the former without reservations.
Re: “men just keep winning” and that essay, as I recall that’s a polemical text (Dworkin’s usually are). I don’t think it’s intended literally that *all* men *everywhere* are always doing this and that. No more than “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common” means that no bosses anywhere have anything in common with workers, or that criticisms of racism means that all white people are equally participants in maintaining white supremacy.
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — June 1, 2009 @ 2:46 pm